Spore's DRM So Effective It Was The Most Downloaded Game
Found on Techdirt on Friday, 05 December 2008
It never really made sense for EA to be so insistent on having draconian DRM on games. Before the company even launched Spore people made it quite clear the plan would backfire, but EA went forward with it anyway, creating a PR nightmare.
Spore has now been declared the most downloaded video game of the year.
The company got a huge PR blackeye which probably only encouraged more people to download the game via file sharing.
That's not really a surprise; DRM had always a bad name and every example that hit the news made it even worse. Incompatibilities, crashes, installation nightmares and rootkits, we've seen it all. There was not a single case where DRM was a success. So no wonder people watch out when DRM is involved. An interesting thought is that DRM might not be designed to stop piracy at all, but to castrate the second hand market; especially those with unique IDs and installation limits.